BOOKS OF THE TIMES

BOOKS OF THE TIMES; A Shattered Idyll Among the Birds

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Published: August 5, 1994

Toward the end of Howard Norman's quirky new novel, the narrator paints a huge mural for the village church. Because the narrator -- one Fabian Vas, by name -- is a "bird artist," an aspiring Audubon, as it were, the mural is filled with birds: puffins and sandpipers, herring gulls and black-legged kittiwakes, petrels and murres, a ring-necked duck, a hooded merganser, a blue heron and an owl. The mural, however, is also a portrait of Fabian's hometown, and it contains fanciful portraits of some of the town's better-known residents: Botho August, the sullen lighthouse keeper, appears as a sort of dark angel, spreading his wings as he peers down from the topmost window of his lighthouse; Reverend Sillet has levitated to the roof of his church, where he stands perched atop the weathervane, and Helen Twombly, the local eccentric, surfaces as a mermaid in a pretty cove.

The combination of childlike folk art and sophisticated realism that animates Fabian's painting also serves as an apt description of Mr. Norman's writing in "The Bird Artist," a novel that's part allegory, part coming-of-age story, part murder melodrama.

Like Mr. Norman's first novel, the critically acclaimed "Northern Lights," and his last collection of stories ("Kiss in the Hotel Joseph Conrad and Other Stories"), "The Bird Artist" takes place in an isolated part of Canada, far from the blandishments of civilization. The setting, in this case, is the small town of Witless Bay, Newfoundland; the time, the years before World War I. Most of the women in Witless Bay sew their own clothes. Many of the men work as fishermen or boatbuilders. It takes about a month in good weather to send a letter and receive a reply from Halifax, Nova Scotia.

As Fabian tells us in the novel's opening pages, he has been drawing birds since he was a child. Fabian's taciturn parents have sustained a long, unhappy marriage -- his mother, Alaric, daydreams of adventure far away from Witless Bay, while his father, Orkney, shrugs off adversity with stoical disregard -- and the lonely boy has found in the drawing of birds a sense of purpose and spiritual communion. "Drawing birds was what I most loved," he says. "It had been from the beginning." He has been studying bird drawing by correspondence with an elderly artist named Isaac Sprague, who is a stickler for detail and nuance.

How does this quiet, studious boy become the man who murders Botho August? That is the story Fabian proceeds to tell us in the pages of "The Bird Artist."

At 15, it seems, Fabian began having an affair with Margaret Handle, the mailboat operator's domineering daughter, who drinks like a fish and likes to shoot ducks. Margaret is four years older than Fabian, and has earned the undying enmity of Fabian's mother. We later learn that both women have slept with the same man: Botho August.

In an effort to get Fabian to forget Margaret, his parents arrange to have him married off to a distant cousin he has never met. For some reason, Fabian never really objects: he isn't terribly enthusiastic about the arrangement, but he goes along with it anyway, partly out of a desire to please his parents, partly out of curiosity, partly out of a bizarre lack of will. The marriage to his cousin will last less than an hour.

While Orkney Vas goes off to earn some extra money for his son's wedding and honeymoon, his wife takes up with Botho August. Fabian reacts much the way Hamlet initially reacts to his mother's affair with his uncle: he sulks, he fumes, he agonizes. "We had set up a strict pattern of avoidance, my mother and I," Fabian recalls. "We fell into it; it had gone unspoken. One day there is a family, the next day there is not."

Given all the gossip in Witless Bay, Orkney Vas realizes what has been going on behind his back the minute he sets foot back in town. His anger sets off a series of events that will culminate in Fabian's murder of Botho, a murder that will send the entire Vas family in flight from Witless Bay, and Fabian in search of redemption from his violent past. Fabian will find that he has been permanently exiled from the innocent, circumscribed world of birds and imagination that he inhabited as a child, and immersed -- for both better and worse -- in the world of human emotions.

Writing in clean, crystalline prose, Mr. Norman does a wonderful job of making Fabian's melodramatic story completely palpable. Although the book's whimsical details -- from its characters' peculiar names to their eccentric obsessions -- lend it a certain fairy-tale quality, although many of the characters are little more than quickly sketched cameos, Mr. Norman is able to use his sure narrative instincts to weave all these elements into a tale that possesses both the resonance of a fable and the immediacy of a newspaper feature. He has written a bewitching little novel that glows like a night light in the reader's mind.